The core Hub activities will be based at Brunel strongly supported by the complementary expertise of our academic spokes at Oxford, Leeds, Manchester and Imperial College and with over £40M investment from our industrial partners. We are now establishing the Future Liquid Metal Engineering Hub to address these challenges. However, the industry faces severe challenges, including "hollowing-out" over the past 30 years, increasing energy and materials costs, tightening environmental regulations and a short supply of skilled people. The UK metal casting industry adds £2.6bn/yr to the UK economy, employs 30,000 people, produces 1.14bnT of metal castings per year and underpins the competitive position of every sector of UK manufacturing. Such metal stock will become our energy "bank" and a rich resource for meeting our future needs. It is estimated that more than 50% of this metal still exists as accessible stock in our society. Between 19 we produced 833MT of aluminium, 506MT of copper and 33bnT of steels. However, the good news is that metals are in principle infinitely recyclable and that their recycling requires only a small fraction of the energy required for primary metal production. Clearly, we cannot continue this increasing and dissipative use of our limited natural resources. The world currently produces 50MT of Al and 2bnT of steel each year, accounting for 7-8% of the world's total energy consumption and 8% of the total global CO2 emission. However, metal extraction and refining is extremely energy intensive and causes a huge negative impact on our environment. Metallic materials are the backbone of manufacturing and the fuel for economic growth. This level of overconsumption is obviously not sustainable, and there is a compelling need for us to use our advanced science and technology to work with, rather than to exploit, nature. With an anticipated world population of 9.3bn in 2050, the predicted global natural resource consumption will be almost tripled. A shocking fact is that our cumulative consumption of natural resources over the last 60 years is greater than that over the whole of previous human history. However, due to continued resource overconsumption and the rapidly increasing world population, the global demand for natural resources and the related intense pressure on our environment have reached an unprecedented and unsustainable level. Natural resources are the foundation of our life on Earth, without which neither our economy nor society can function.
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